Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness

Psychiatry Ponders Whether Extreme Bias Can Be an Illness

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 10, 2005; Page A01

The 48-year-old man turned down a job because he feared that a co-worker would be gay. He was upset that gay culture was becoming mainstream and blamed most of his personal, professional and emotional problems on the gay and lesbian movement.

These fixations preoccupied him every day. Articles in magazines about gays made him agitated. He confessed that his fears had left him socially isolated and unemployed for years: A recovering alcoholic, the man even avoided 12-step meetings out of fear he might encounter a gay person.



Darrel A. Regier of the American Psychiatric Association favors research but says it is not clear that establishing a diagnosis would be useful. (By Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)
"He had a fixed delusion about the world," said Sondra E. Solomon, a psychologist at the University of Vermont who treated the man for two years. "He felt under attack, he felt threatened."

Mental health practitioners say they regularly confront extreme forms of racism, homophobia and other prejudice in the course of therapy, and that some patients are disabled by these beliefs. As doctors increasingly weigh the effects of race and culture on mental illness, some are asking whether pathological bias ought to be an official psychiatric diagnosis.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/09/AR2005120901938.html

and probably an Ldotter.

...paranoia, obsession, delusion. I wouldn't call extreme bias an illness in itself, but it certainly is indicative of possible mental illness.

What can be applied to bias at one end of a spectrum can be applied to the other end as well.

This is dangerously close to thought crimes.

When "I don't like gays" becomes a phobia that prevents a person from doing the activities of daily living like shopping and working for fear of being "contaminated" by unknowingly dealing with a gay person, then it is an illness.

The test is whether or not the bias is extreme enough to wreck your life. In some people, this is genuinely the case. In others, it just makes them ordinary assholes.

Some conservatives would define BEING gay as wrecking ones life. At what point does a differing opinion become a disfunctional illness?

I do agree that at some point a bias becomes a form of paranoia. But it's an edge of human behavior that I feel needs to be approached with utmost caution, lest we all be required to take a psychiatric attitude test to deliver along with our drug test before flipping burgers at McDonalds.

Are KKK members who lynch or beat people for being gay, Jewish, or Black delusional or pathological?

Fred Phelps, case in point.

Extreme fear and hate, to the point one develops dysfunctional behaviors or dehabiliating thoughts, IS a type of mental illness.

We also live in a society that gives people like Rush and his ilk a platform to promote fear and hatred. The GOP use gays as a whipping post all the time, it's disgusting and needs to stop.

We have people in authority claiming to hear and follow the voices of God - schizophrenia would be the first thing that comes to my mind. Of course, shrub uses it to score points with the fundies just like the radical Islamics justify blowing themselves up in the name of Allah. It's indeed a delusional disorder.

...as in the hard right wrongism, "Libralism is a mental disorder."

Simple projection of their true subconscious feelings: "Rabid Rightism is a mental disorder. And we are hell-bent in our love for hate!"

As soon as they start attacking the Dems/liberals on an issue, it's guaranteed they are guilty of accused action. How many books have they written about the Dems trying to steal the 2004 presidential election? Projection is their MO, always has been.

We do seem to be hardwired to sort things and people into different groups. This is one of the roots of prejudice, as it is the core of the "us vs. them" mentality. Some suggest that we are even hardwired to be prejudiced, to blame our problems on "them" (whichever "them" our brains decide is/are) the culprit). My personal opinion is that teaching (by parents, teachers, peers, the media and the community) has a much bigger role in this than any hardwiring.

Think about it. From birth we are exposed to thousands of messages from people and the media. Our parents tell us who to associate with and who to avoid, in the process instilling their prejudices to us. We may be taken to Church, where we may be told that gay people are abominations who deserve to die. Television floods us with images of black people who are thugs, so we may grow up thinking that this is how all black people are. Perhaps our father is virulently anti-semitic and longs for the day that all Jewish people would be deported from America.

As we grow older and move into young adulthood we may join groups that allow us to foster the biases that were impressed upon us in our youth. We join a strict fundamentalist Church and participate in rallies to denounce the sin of homosexuality. Or perhaps we become a member of Aryan Nation or the Skin Heads. Whatever we do, we cultivate the hatred we have, and even pass it on to others.

There is a strong element of fear here as well. It is bred into us, and carefully nurtured--first by the person who put it there, and later by ourselves. Fear is an exquisite breeder of hate, for people who fear for their safety, their livelihood, their family, their lives, will go to great lengths to protect it. They will donate time, money and effort to be sure. And in some cases they will even commit acts of great evil such as destroying property or attacking/killing people.



So is it a mental illness? It probably could qualify as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, one of the personality disorders. If the person is so engaged in their ideas and behaviors that they can't live a normal life they definitely need some form of intervention, and if they pose a danger to themselves or others they need to be taken off the streets.